The View From the Lens of an Israeli Tank’s Scope

Lebanon

Oshri Cohen, left, and Itay Tiran as Israeli soldiers in “Lebanon,” written and directed by Samuel Maoz.Credit
Sony Pictures Classics

A scene early in “Lebanon” dramatizes the moral confusion of combat with unusual clarity and force. Shmulik (Yoav Donat), a nervous young Israeli soldier who operates the main gun in a tank, has orders to shoot a fast-approaching car. Through his viewfinder he can see the faces of the driver and passengers, and the fact of their humanity paralyzes his hand, preventing him from firing.

The men, enemy fighters, are killed anyway, and Shmulik’s hesitation causes the gruesome death — which he also witnesses through the scope — of a soldier on his own side. A bit later, Shmulik masters his terror and fires a shell into another vehicle, blowing up what appears to be an innocent chicken farmer.

In a few seconds the young man’s ethical universe has been dismantled and replaced by a cruder set of imperatives: keep moving; do what you can to survive; obey orders; when in doubt, shoot to kill. This is an abstract way of summarizing something that has, partly because of the close and crowded space of the tank, an almost unbearable intimacy. “Lebanon” is meticulous, nearly clinical in its attention to what happens in war — specifically what happened in the first days of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 — but it is also a palpably and intensely personal film. You would feel this even if you did not know that Shmulik would grow up to be the writer and director of “Lebanon,” Samuel Maoz.

The movie, which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival last year, provides American audiences with fresh evidence of the artistic awakening of Israeli cinema, which has been a striking development on the international scene in recent years. While the current generation of Israeli filmmakers has ranged widely across the country’s social and political problems (almost to the point of discovering some new ones), the Lebanon war has proved to be an especially fertile and imposing subject.

Joseph Cedar’s “Beaufort” takes place a generation after Mr. Maoz’s film, and, like it, examines the claustrophobia and fear of a group of young men in hostile terrain. Ari Folman’s “Waltz With Bashir” splits its attention between the present and the early 1980s, using animation to bring the memories of veterans to haunting and surreal life.

“Lebanon,” Mr. Maoz’s first feature, is in its way as formally daring as Mr. Folman’s hallucinatory documentary. With the exception of the first and last shots, which echo each other, the perspective is entirely confined to the inside of the tank, a vehicle that becomes both a cauldron of psychological distress and something of a metaphor.

A handful of soldiers dwell inside it — in addition to Shmulik there are the driver, Yigal (Michael Moshonov); a wise guy named Hertzel (Oshri Cohen); and their anxious superior officer, Assi (Itay Tiran) — in a vulnerable state of isolation. They have only a partial sense of what is happening outside. Voices crackle over the radio, giving them hard-to-understand instructions and unconvincing reassurances.

Occasionally a visitor pops in: the body of a dead comrade; a Syrian prisoner; a member of the Christian Phalangist militia allied with the Israelis. The most frequent guest is an officer named Jamil (Zohar Strauss), who tries to control an increasingly dangerous situation and to keep the men in the tank, who have less experience than he does, from panicking or going crazy. He directs them toward a place absurdly called San Tropez and promises that getting there will be a cakewalk.

Instead it is an excursion through hell. The scope offers a narrow window into the world beyond the tank and presents vistas of carnage and destruction. Its lens also allows Mr. Maoz and Giora Bejach, the director of photography, to vary the tone and composition of the images, affording some relief from the dim, dank interior of the vehicle.

The limited, rounded-off perspective of the frames, and the occasional absence of sound, makes it seem as if Shmulik were watching an especially lurid and violent silent film. Even as he is in the midst of the defining experience of his life, he encounters it from a distance, as a series of discontinuous nightmare images. At one point, outside a travel agency, he catches sight of the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben and then, twice, the twin towers of the World Trade Center. An omen, perhaps, and certainly not an accident.

“Lebanon” is a compact film, just over 90 minutes long, including credits, and it confines its attention in time as well as in space, focusing on a single episode in a much bigger story. Like some American films about Afghanistan and Iraq — “The Hurt Locker,” for example, and the recent documentary “Restrepo” — it keeps the political dimensions of the war on the margins and in the subtext. The men in the tank never talk about why they are fighting and do not have a very clear idea of whom they are fighting, either. Why are there Syrians here? one of them wonders, and another is unsure about whose side the Phalangists are on.

Nothing is resolved. The story does not end so much as stop, in a state of desperate exhaustion. In military terms it is not clear what has been accomplished. But in its creative audacity, the precision of its psychological portraiture and, above all, in its uncompromising moral seriousness, “Lebanon” accomplishes about as much as any war movie can.

A version of this review appears in print on August 6, 2010, on page C6 of the New York edition with the headline: The View From the Lens Of an Israeli Tank’s Scope. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe